Around 22,000 dead. More than 1,20,000 injured. Rs 1 lakh for each body. Rs 25,000 for every poisoned lung and damaged heart and blinded eyes. 26 years of long wait. And just 2 years in jail for the men who committed the worst crime against the people of this country.Thousands more are still waiting to be accepted as victims. People of Bhopal are still drinking toxic water poisoned by Union Carbide in December 1984. And the main culprit is living life kingsize in a mansion in New York.
If there is a failed state in the world, it’s India. It’s not Iraq. It’s not Somalia. It’s not Sudan. It’s India.
In all these three decades, the poor victims have done everything they could to get justice and compensation. They have cried and died on streets, sat hungry and faced police lathis on roads and filed court cases in the hope that one day they will get justice. And this!!. Justice- if we can it one.
Today, it was proved all over again that those who do politics in the name of poor in this country, always rule for the rich. The chairman of UC at the time of the gas attack (it was not an accident, the gas leak was caused because of cost-cutting steps taken by him) on the people of Bhopal, Anderson was arrested and later released on bail. He ran off to US in 1986 and we have not been able to find him or ask the US to extradite Anderson to India. Why?
*Why did Union Carbide not apply the same safety standards at its plant in India as it operated at a sister plant in West Virginia, US?
*On the night of the disaster, why did the six safety measures designed to prevent a gas leak fail to function?
*Why was the safety siren, intended to alert the people living close to the factory, turned off?
The people are entitled an answer for these questions.
Can an American come to India kill people in this country and run away with no consequences? That seems to be the case. We are still struggling to get a chance to question David Headley Coleman, an American citizen responsible for the worst terror attack on an Indian city in 2008. Will we succeed in getting Headley extradited to India?
Rs 1 lakh for every body. Rs 25,000 for every blinded eye. This is the cost of poor life in a failed state.
No country sells its people so cheap.
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